ABSTRACT
While Sir William Brandon was pursuing his ambitious schemes, and, notwithstanding Lucy’s firm and steady refusal of Lord Mauleverer, was still determined on that ill-sorted marriage; while Mauleverer himself, day after day, attended at the Judge’s house, and, though he spoke not of love, looked it with all his might; it became obvious to every one but the lover and the guardian, that Lucy herself was rapidly declining in appearance and health. Ever since the day she had last seen Clifford, her spirit, before greatly shattered, had refused to regain even a likeness to its natural cheerful and happy tone. She became silent and abstracted; even her gentleness of temper altered at times into a moody and fretful humour. Neither to books nor music, nor any art by which time is 306beguiled, she recurred for a momentary alleviation of the bitter feelings at her heart, or for a transient forgetfulness of their sting. The whole world of her mind had been shaken. Her pride was wounded; her love galled; her faith in Clifford gave way at length to gloomy and dark suspicion. Nothing, she now felt, but a name as well as fortunes utterly abandoned, could have justified him for the stubbornness of heart in which he had fled and deserted her. Her own self-acquittal no longer consoled her in affliction. She condemned herself for her weakness, from the birth of her ill-starred affection to the crisis it had now acquired. ‘Why did I not wrestle with it at first?’ she said bitterly. ‘Why did I allow myself so easily to love one unknown to me, and equivocal in station, despite the cautions of my uncle and the whispers of the world?’ Alas! Lucy did not remember, that at the time she was guilty of this weakness, she had not learned to reason as she since reasoned. Her faculties were but imperfectly awakened; her experience of the world was utter ignorance. She scarcely knew that she loved, and she knew not at all that the delicious and excited sentiment which filled her being could ever become as productive of evil and peril as it had done now; and even had her reason been more developed, and her resolutions more strong, does the exertion of reason and resolution always avail against the master-passion? Love, it is true, is not unconquerable; but how few have ever, mind and soul, coveted the conquest! Disappointment makes a vow, but the heart records it not. Or, in the noble image of one who has so tenderly and so truly portrayed the feelings of her own sex, – —‘We make A ladder of our thoughts where angels step, But sleep ourselves at the foot!’ *
